The Outliers

February 7, 2016February 12, 2016

The concept of herd immunity came from a time when people were not vaccinating

‘We’re often told about herd immunity. So that’s basically saying that you’re irresponsible if you don’t vaccinate yourself or your child because you’re putting other people at risk. Well, there’s a few problems with that theory. One is that if people trust their vaccines, they shouldn’t be worried about what you’re doing. But even more problematic to me is that the more I understand about vaccines, the more I understand that so many of the people that are vaccinated are actually developing the disease and then infecting other people… often times shortly after they’re vaccinated.

You know, I used to think this didn’t happen, but just recently I came across an article about cases in Croatia where these children were vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, and about a week after the vaccination they developed measles and infected other people. And the article said that in the past they would’ve never made the link that it was vaccine strain causing the infections, because they would’ve either called it another disease, because the child was vaccinated, or they would’ve thought that it was a wild virus not from the vaccine.

But now that we have the ability to test is it wild or is it vaccine strain, we’re seeing that these vaccines can and do infect after these people are vaccinated. We know it happens with rotavirus, the swallowed virus that are given to infants. We know that it happens with oral polio vaccines. We know it happens with measles, and always we’ve known it happened with rubella.

So when people want to use this herd immunity argument, it’s really not very rationale, and this concept of herd immunity really came from a time when people were not vaccinating. There was a doctor who looked at populations, and he noticed that when 95% of the population of children below 15 had had measles that epidemics were at a very low rate, and when that changed, when that dropped, then they would see some outbreaks. But it wasn’t that people were dying left, right, and center, because, as we know, the death rate went down not as a result of vaccination. So this concept of herd immunity does really not apply to vaccination.’